A TiVo is at least as useful for someone who watches only a little TV as it is for someone who watches a lot. You describe the vast majority of TV programming, but there are a few gems out there depending on your interests - from genuinly clever shows like Futurama or Family Guy to informative shows like Good Eats or plenty of stuff on the History channel. The thing is, if you're just an infrequent TV viewer there is very little chance than anything worth watching will be on when you happen to be looking to kill a little time. If you only watch a couple hours of TV a week, you watch the BEST 2 hours of TV for that week (as defined by you). You don't have to sit through comercials, or reruns, or sit down at the TV at a specific time. It removes all the crap and leaves the best of what TV has to offer.
Yeah, this sort of analysis seems fairly frivolous. Everybody uses email differently. I've noticed fairly substantial "email culture" differences in the jobs I've worked at. At my current job I usually get about 10 emails a day from people I've never met in other departments telling the whole world they're stepping out early for a doctor's apointment, a dozen reminders every month to fill out your time cards (sent to everybody regarless of if they're already filled out), etc. Like the parent poster, I do more than glance at less than 50% of my email, and this is internal email with no real spam. At previous jobs the email culture was such that managers would send time sensitive requests by email, we discussed more detailed technical issues, and there were much fewer "worthless" mails. Email was used in a very different fashion. When I got far less numbers of email, I spent more of my time on it. Not only did I have a much higher rate of reply, but I also had mail notification turned on and you've got to figure on the cost of context switching from whatever I was already working on when that little chime goes off (more than 3 minutes if the thought required is not trivial).
The falicy in your assertion is that everyone always behaves in their own best interests. How many crazy people does it take to start a nuclear war? Also keep in mind that crazy from a Western point of view could also be seen as "having radically different cultural values". There are plenty of people who would gladly risk (or even deliberately cause) worldwide extermination because they know they're doing the will of God and have 77 vigins waiting for them in heaven. Overestimating your enemy can be as bad as underestimating them, and depending on people's "common sense" is tantamount to playing Russian Roulette. Eventually you're gonna get shot.
I think you're overestimating the difficulty here. Blizzard is banning accounts, a rather large cost to being caught so their rate of catching people doesn't have to be very high. Imagine they employ a single clueful techie even half time to find any infringements. It won't stop all sales obviously, but it would stop most sales between people who didn't know each other already, reducing item sales by several orders of magnitude. Would you buy/sell something if there is a non-negligable chance you'll lose your account because somebody who knows what they're doing has bots scanning the USENET?
Re:Outsourcing made simple
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Offshoring IT
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm so tired of hearing arguments in this vein. Just like any utopian ideal the perfection of a free market breaks down in the real world. There are many, many things which complicate the issue beyond the "economics 101" stage that people for some reason incessantly parrot (hint: there is a reason there are classes above 101). The free market is not some divine mandate which me must uphold, and neither is it anywhere close to perfect in the real world. Your argument seems to be that a total hands off approach will maximize the benefit to society. The problem with this oversimplification is the factors you're not taking into account. Here are a few, I'm sure your imagination can come up with more.
1) American policy should be based on what's best for America. The benefit to other countries doesn't significantly enter into this consideration.
2) The benefit of cheaper products for American consumers is offset by the decrease in buying power. Wealth concentration is increasing, and the middle class is shrinking. Look at the bigger picture. If executive salaries are skyrocketing while money is pouring out of the country, where do you think the money is coming from?
3) Displaced workers incur a cost on society. In the best case scenario they are retrained, presumably at a non-insignificant cost for some other high-skilled job. More likely they work a more menial job, slipping down the economic food chain and contributing less than they were in taxes and using a larger portion of government funded programs.
4) Cost to society is more than a dollar value. Even IF there is a positive sum transaction displacing workers where every single worker manages to find a comparable new job there is a psychological cost. How much time has the Slashdot collective spent stressing about long term job prospects? What about white collar workers in other fields who can see the trends? What about people who have to move away from friends and family for a new job? Or work in an area which is less fulfilling to them? These costs are impossible to quantify, but are an example of intangible costs.
5) Where does this trend leave us long term. Even if every individual transaction is economically beneficial, what other impacts does it have? The collapse of the middle class is one possible impact. Rampant inflation as the US dollar fails is another. These are really other topics of discussion, I just mention them to illustrate that there are more considerations than A + B > C
Yes, the end of a lot of business models are in sight due to recent advanYes, the end of a lot of business models are in sight due to recent technological empowerments of consumers. Trying to sweep back the tide with laws and artificial limitations is an exercise in futility. So your question as to what takes the place of ad revenue is the million dollar question. Anybody with half a brain can come up with some ideas, but the clever guy who figures out a new business model that works well given the current environment is gonna make bank, and promptly be imitated by the rest of the industry. Just because the crazy idea of giving content away and making money on the side effects in a certain format has worked so well for so long doesn't mean it can or should continue to work. What took the place of ad revenue when pop up blockers became main stream? What took the place of subscription revenue when people started getting their news from the net instead of the newspaper? Cry me a river if mediocre sit-com stars can no longer get 10 million dollars an episode because the consumer has got other options now.
As far as Tivo placing adds on the screen, there is nothing morally wrong with it, the consumer is just getting less value from their service, assuming their attention is worth something. ces in consumer technology
Sorry you had such a bum experience, but it seems like your gripes don't have much to do with the online portion of online dating. I did the online dating thing for a couple of years and ended up meeting my wife through Match.com. Sure, I had a couple of, um, interesting dates, and yeah there were several woman who brushed me off or were bitches, but that's no different than any other way you meet women. Have you ever been to a bar and seen a reasonably attractive woman sitting alone? For long?
Most women you would want to date are used to being hit on all the time. Yes, they do have a lot of choices, all they have to do is not put up a fight to get picked up. I'll let you in on a secret though. Women worth dating don't want to be picked up by 99% of the jerks out there. Obviously you don't want someone hung up on movie star looks. Great! They're weeding themselves out for you by not responding to you. Trust me there are good women out there interested in more than tight abs, you just need to find the ones that are a good match for you. There is no secret here, if you're looking for a rare woman you just have to go through a lot of them. That's a lot easier to do online, and in my experience it's a lot easier to present a good first impression when you're not shy and stammering. Oh, and don't take it personally if some bimbo blows you off. Keep in mind, most people in general aren't worth knowing, and people that act like that already have two strikes against them....
You're kidding, right? While I agree that some of these predictions are optimistic, you can't honestly claim that life is essentially the same as it was before cell phones and the internet. I guess it might be, depending on your lifestyle, but not if you're really using these technologies. I've had the internet my entire adult life, and a cell phone for most of it, and I can no more really picture life without them any more than I could life without automobiles. I can't imagine not being able to look up anything I want on wikipedia, or finding the cheapest and best goods in the world at my fingertips, or being exposed to world news not prepackaged by huge media conglomerates. I can look up how to fix my toaster, or if I need to be worried about that rash, or what the best home remedy is for an ant infestation. You have access to a significant portion of mankind's knowledge, and you claim that's not a big deal? To a lesser extent, the cell phone is also a significant change in lifestyle. Lose track of your party at the zoo? Have a breakdown on the side of the road? Need to dial 911 when you're not at home? Worried because you're kid is late coming home? None of these are as life altering as the net, but they do (can) significantly change how we live our lives.
As I said, some of these predictions are optimistic, but you only need one or two Big Things to significantly change how we live our day to day lives.
Ps. Now I've seen everything. On Slashdot you ask what have computers done for us in the last 2 decades and get modded insightful.
Why do I do it? The same reason I skip commercials on my Tivo (and presumably you use that time to go to the bathroom or get another drink), change the radio station when another 10 minute car brand screaming fest begins, and flip past the half of the magazine telling me I need to smoke cigarettes and get plastic surgery. Just because somebody is giving something away for free (or cheap)with the hope that they can make money on it does not make me obligated to allocate my (finite and valuable) attention where they hope I will. Yes, bandwidth costs money, and if webmasters can make ends meet by taking advantage of human nature more power to them. Me spending my attention on crap I will NEVER spend a dime on DOES NOT HELP THEM. Ads support websites because some people buy what is advertised, the demographic that uses ad blocking are poeple who don't respond well to ads anyway.
The entire reason ad blocking exists is because flashing pop up/under seizure inducing immoral fucks try and force me to waste my attention on their crap. Is anybody trying to block Google ads?
Come on, are you serious? Setting aside the fucked up legal system in this country, you're actually saying the laywer has a moral right to not be called names? Don't get me wrong, trolls are only slightly better than lawyers, but Jesus Christ if you're so thin skinned that a 14 year old can make you cry I'm not sure what you're doing on the internet. Gimme a break, you can't enter a flame war than cry foul when the trolls show up. IMHO this is a big part of whats wrong with America. A "right" not to be humiliated in a public place. Gimme a break and learn how to live in the real world. Dealing with rude people is a necessity of living in the modern world, trying to sue them away seems so counterproductive as to be almost a parody.
I've heard a lot of arguments against micropayments based on this "nobody would use it" argument. Why pay for things when you can theoretically get the same thing for free somewhere else? Because there is percieved value there greater than what you are paying to access it. A pretty direct analogy in fairly widespread use already is sites that require free registration to access "premium" content. Because it takes some of your time, which presumably has a positive value, the cost of accessing this info is non-zero. Sure, some people (especially around here) get aggrivated and don't use such sites, but apparently enough people do register to keep such sites in that model.
The percieved need by the customer is the need for the access to premium content. If a site has things which you cannot *easily* get from a competing free site, it's worth $.01 to a lot of people to just click and access it. This is how I imagine micropayments will catch on, with sites having a free section to get you hooked, then having a micropayment to access the premium stuff once they've got your interest and raised the percieved value over $.01.
Most people suck at being parents. Its hard to do well, and most people lack the aptitude, the drive to put in the effort, or both. That's been the case since this race was started, and it's nothing newly caused by TV. Most people make poor teachers(and students) as well for the same reason. This is nothing new, its just become fashionable to bitch about it lately. The reason there are more divorces today is because of a shift in cultural value. Divorces of today were the bad marriages of yesterday. People haven't gotten any worse at relationships, they just value the institution of marriage less.
The reason both parents usually work is because the buying power of the average paycheck has plummeted. Sure, you can live off of just one salary in theory, if you just don't buy STUFF. You don't really need broadband, heck, even dialup is not strictly necessary..use the library! Braces for your daughter are realy just cosmetic surgery, and traveling a bit to show your kids what the world has to offer is a needless waste. Hmmm, maybe that cheap apartment you're renting doesn't seem like such a good idea when you see the types of friends you son makes, but at least your wife is home to watch! What, she wants to see the world outside your door once and a while to? Well, you can't really afford tickets to anything or more than McDonalds, but she's welcome to see anything within walking distance! I sure hope your kids can get scholarships, 'cause you sure can't afford to help them out....
Stop and think about what it really takes to raise a family of four on $30-40k/year today (most people make less than us L337 IT jockeys). Can it be done? Of course, but you give up a hell of a lot of good opportunities not just for you, but for your children.
Granted, I am fairly vehemently anti-corporate/advertising, but having spent the last 10 months on one income as my wife is on maternity leave, I can tell you you lose a lot more than crap you didn't really want in the first place. You miss good opportunities with the bad, which is why my wife is going back to work shortly.
Right, Blockbuster is getting screwed, but there isn't much that they can do about it because they're just the middleman. There is a benefit to most consumer (see my original post), and thus a demand. The thing is, you don't really need Blockbuster to carry the DVDs now. Since there are no returns to worry about, you could have vending machines dispense them, or order them off the net, or have a movie club where you get x number of new releases mailed to you every month, you can stock them at Wal-Mart, you can sell them door to door, etc.
Now, if customers are demanding it, and the supplier doesn't need Blockbuster anymore, Blockbuster's choices are to straight up lose a large part of their market, or take the little bit of profit it can get by selling these things.
Frankly, I don't really understand why everybody here is frothing at the mouth about this. Seems like a good deal to me. You can, of course, still buy a full movie if you want to own it, but if you just want to rent one for one viewing this is a hell of a lot more convenient.
Dominions II is a mind bogglingly complex turn based strategy game I've recently discovered. It has so many elements in it that make you go "why hasn't anybody done this before?". The detail level is insane, from the 400+ spells to the mind boggling variety of units, its as deep as it is wide. Not only do they have practically every type of fantasy unit you can imagine, each one has all the stats of a typical RPG character and gains not only experience and skills, but battle afflictions like losing an eye or gaining a limp, and thats not even counting the hero units. The creativity is amazingly refreshing. Instead of the typical elves/orcs/dwarves there are elvish-flavored vikings, giant-spider-riding africans, lava men, and a dozen other equally fresh playable races. The distinct difference of picking one of dozens of gods(that you actually walk around and kick ass with), one of 17(?I think?) races, and ballancing 8 paths of magic make the replayability of this game more than any I've ever played.
On the downside, the initial learning curve is a bit steep. Check out the demo but believe me, even the veteran gamer will want to take a run through the fan created tutorial
Re:And -- duh -- there's no market for it anyway
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Yet Another Degrading DVD
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Take a step back and pretend that you're not part of the Slashdot crowd, you're part of the VAST MAJORITY of people who are not inclined to hacking stuff. The grandmothers, the wives, the truck drivers, you know, all those poeple who have unsecured/unpatched computers sitting on broadband connections PLUS all the people who don't even use a computer/the net regularly. Now, looking at it through their eyes, what do you see? You head down to blockbuster to pick up the latest hollywood hype, and you're presented with two options. Lets assume they are the same price.
1) Regular DVD. Fair chance it's scratched up a the previous renter, and when you forget to return it (which you often do) it's gonna end up costing you twice as much. You can watch it as many times as you want (in two days), and even lend it to a friend (try not to get it back late!)
2) Disposable DVD. It's a fresh copy virtually garaunteed to not be scratched. You can only watch the movie once, but that's all you planned on doing anyway. Toss it when you're done, gauranteed no late fees.
Now, think about how you'd explain to your mom why she doesn't want #2, and tell me again how there is no market.
As far as who is going to sell it, the middleman doesn't really have much of a say in that. If the big money supplier is pushing it, and the customers are demanding it, the free market will force the middleman to sell it or lose out to his competition that is.
This is just silly logic. Most coders of ANY age aren't good hackers. Just because the toys you learned to hack on had less bits than the ones I did doesn't make you a king with a deeper innate understanding of technology. Giving a kid a degree doesn't make them a hacker, but learning in a different environment than you did doesn't mean the younger hackers didn't learn the same lessons. Make no mistake about it, the younger you is out there, and he was taking apart his own toys at 10, they were just different than the ones you grew up with. You can turn out better code today because of your experience, but it's pretty assinine to think anyone who had different toys than you will never catch up.
Yeah, up until about a month ago I worked at the same company. This last pay-raise-that's-really-a-pay-cut was the straw that broke the camel's back. The whole blatant lack of regard for their employees just got to be too much. After I leave I hear about them shifting huge amounts of jobs overseas, so I guess it was a good time to get out. In the 2.5 years I was there:
1) I was told that in spite of being a top performer I was getting a crappy review because seniority dictated that the small number of good reviews go to the dead weight that had been there longer than I'd been alive.
2) In spite of virtually single handledly saving a multi-million dollar contract with months worth of hard work, I was chastised for not working enough overtime while accomplishing it.
3) How is it possible to have more management than producers, yet still not have an ounce of leadership among them? I think Dilbert read strips about us...
Well, Best Buy guys don't work on commission, but back in the day I worked at Circuit City, and we did work on commission there. The pressure to sell the extended warranty was ridiculous. Most of the time the commission would be on the order of $1-$10 for selling a $1200 computer system, then an extra $35 or so for selling a $250 extended warranty. On top of the fact that you couldn't make a living working straight commission without selling it on most of your sales, if your percentage of sales with it wasn't high enough you wouldn't be working there long.
That money is nearly straight profit, you do the math on whether it's a good deal for the customer to buy it....
The problem is that each of these has a drawback, and as you're stacking solutions you're also stacking drawbacks. So now we need to worry about false positives, collateral damage, and legal system abuses. Since more or less all of these partial solutions are out there now, I guess you are thinking we just need to standardize such tactics. Problem is, the internet is inherently heterogeneous. Having a hundred different implementations of a dozen different types of solutions all running at once will make email unreliable enought to kill it as a legitamate communications medium. We're already heading down that path now.
The basis of your argument is that there is fundamentally no difference between spam and other forms of unsolicited communication. Well, obviously there is, because spam is an increasingly significant problem whereas conversing with people at the pub is not. Technology makes spam a different problem because of the scale. Many things that are permisable or even desirable at one scale become undesirable at another.
Your argument is analogous to saying "we can't make fully automatic assault rifles illegal without making pistols illegal to, they're the same thing. Pellet guns to."
Where I work, it's a corporate mandate that we work at least 10% overtime all the time. Doesn't sound that bad next to people working 60-80 hours a week, but the thing is the way they calculate it. Employees must work a certain number of hours in a year, which means that extra week or two of vacation you get for seniority (not to mention sick time, non-billable training, etc.)is just extra overtime that you have to work to make up.
I guess it's understandable since they bill the customer for me by the hour, who doesn't like free money? The thing that kills me though is that it's independent of workload/schedules, so if we're in between emergency deadlines and I finish my stuff early I better damn well surf the net in the office for the rest of my overtime hours....
Re:Globalization - We didn't vote for it.
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Globalization
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· Score: 1
Cafes and coffee shops are (partially) replaced by McDonalds and Starbucks because thats what the people who spend money want. Blue Jeans and baseball hats are spreading because thats what people who spend money want. People DO vote for such things quite literally with thier pounds, yet, etc.
Yes, obviously freed slaves were a huge economic buying segment. There was much more money to be made selling things to appallingly poor people than to having free labor.
You're damn right we put individual freedom above virtually every other principal, and you'd do well to remember that when you start complaining about your lack of freedom from American culture.
At my school most of the later classes focussed on team developed projects. OS and compiler classes were pretty straightforward big group efforts, but the real interesting one was my Software Engineering class. The project, which spanned the entire semester, involved three interworking modules, with each person in the class working on an individual implementation of one of the three. After an initial design and preliminary developement period everyone reviewed a certain number of other people's work, and "bought" the two other modules they needed ("bought" modules gained significant grade points). As the project progressed and support for different things for different "customers" was called for, modules could be returned and new ones "bought" with "economic" (read grade) penalties for both dropped vendor and customer, though the newly "bought" module gained points. At the end of the semester the overall projects were graded on a speed test given a specific large input set (i.e. the fastest one got the highest grade).
Generally, once you had proved you have basic coding skills (as in you're in upper level CS classes), the teachers would encourage working together, pretty much most stuff short of cutting and pasting code was cool most of the time. There was an official "intellectual honesty" policy, but really it was just there for the teachers to use in the case of blatantly lazy students. Pretty much it was just an extension fo the study group idea...
1) Drug companies obviously make too much money if they spend it on advertising and lobbying. All the good, hardworking companies cut such things out to be more competitive.
2) If we take away the profit in developing new drugs, we will net more lives saved. We don't need the billions spent by evil investors primarily motivated by money. New drugs will be developed fast enough through good will that lives will not be lost which could have been saved by faster/better research. This certainly won't compound over the next hundred+ years as disease and sickness evolve, I mean heck, everyone knows evolution is a screwy theory. We probably won't even need any new research.
3) Nationalization of private assets for the good of the whole is a great idea. I mean, if you can't trust your government, who can you trust?
Back in my early college days I was working as a on-site residential PC troubleshooter. I have all kinds of interesting stories, but my favorite is this one lady who just kept hovering over me and generally aggravating me to distraction. After an hour or so of her staring over my shoulder and asking questions every time I clicked on anything I finally figured out what the problem was and fixed it(don't remember what it was, doesn't matter to the story). At this point my stress level had been climbing steadily for an hour and I was just ready to leave. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that proclaiming to have found the problem will necessitate a lengthy explanation of what was wrong and how I fixed it, which would in turn necessitate a lengthy background build up on the workings of Windows. So after a minute of thought, I stood up and said I figured out what the problem was. I picked up the potted plant she had on one side of her monitor, and moved it to the other. At this point she is pretty sure I'm bullshitting her, but I tell her to try the computer now. Sure enough, it works great. She's still not buying it, so I come up with some story about the minerals in the plant and electromagnetic radiation, and I throw in some terms I had heard on Star Trek the night before. As I'm walking out the door I remind her to rotate the plant once a month to prevent further buildups.
Slashdot Mirror
A TiVo is at least as useful for someone who watches only a little TV as it is for someone who watches a lot. You describe the vast majority of TV programming, but there are a few gems out there depending on your interests - from genuinly clever shows like Futurama or Family Guy to informative shows like Good Eats or plenty of stuff on the History channel. The thing is, if you're just an infrequent TV viewer there is very little chance than anything worth watching will be on when you happen to be looking to kill a little time. If you only watch a couple hours of TV a week, you watch the BEST 2 hours of TV for that week (as defined by you). You don't have to sit through comercials, or reruns, or sit down at the TV at a specific time. It removes all the crap and leaves the best of what TV has to offer.
Yeah, this sort of analysis seems fairly frivolous. Everybody uses email differently. I've noticed fairly substantial "email culture" differences in the jobs I've worked at. At my current job I usually get about 10 emails a day from people I've never met in other departments telling the whole world they're stepping out early for a doctor's apointment, a dozen reminders every month to fill out your time cards (sent to everybody regarless of if they're already filled out), etc. Like the parent poster, I do more than glance at less than 50% of my email, and this is internal email with no real spam. At previous jobs the email culture was such that managers would send time sensitive requests by email, we discussed more detailed technical issues, and there were much fewer "worthless" mails. Email was used in a very different fashion. When I got far less numbers of email, I spent more of my time on it. Not only did I have a much higher rate of reply, but I also had mail notification turned on and you've got to figure on the cost of context switching from whatever I was already working on when that little chime goes off (more than 3 minutes if the thought required is not trivial).
The falicy in your assertion is that everyone always behaves in their own best interests. How many crazy people does it take to start a nuclear war? Also keep in mind that crazy from a Western point of view could also be seen as "having radically different cultural values". There are plenty of people who would gladly risk (or even deliberately cause) worldwide extermination because they know they're doing the will of God and have 77 vigins waiting for them in heaven. Overestimating your enemy can be as bad as underestimating them, and depending on people's "common sense" is tantamount to playing Russian Roulette. Eventually you're gonna get shot.
I think you're overestimating the difficulty here. Blizzard is banning accounts, a rather large cost to being caught so their rate of catching people doesn't have to be very high. Imagine they employ a single clueful techie even half time to find any infringements. It won't stop all sales obviously, but it would stop most sales between people who didn't know each other already, reducing item sales by several orders of magnitude. Would you buy/sell something if there is a non-negligable chance you'll lose your account because somebody who knows what they're doing has bots scanning the USENET?
I'm so tired of hearing arguments in this vein. Just like any utopian ideal the perfection of a free market breaks down in the real world. There are many, many things which complicate the issue beyond the "economics 101" stage that people for some reason incessantly parrot (hint: there is a reason there are classes above 101). The free market is not some divine mandate which me must uphold, and neither is it anywhere close to perfect in the real world. Your argument seems to be that a total hands off approach will maximize the benefit to society. The problem with this oversimplification is the factors you're not taking into account. Here are a few, I'm sure your imagination can come up with more.
1) American policy should be based on what's best for America. The benefit to other countries doesn't significantly enter into this consideration.
2) The benefit of cheaper products for American consumers is offset by the decrease in buying power. Wealth concentration is increasing, and the middle class is shrinking. Look at the bigger picture. If executive salaries are skyrocketing while money is pouring out of the country, where do you think the money is coming from?
3) Displaced workers incur a cost on society. In the best case scenario they are retrained, presumably at a non-insignificant cost for some other high-skilled job. More likely they work a more menial job, slipping down the economic food chain and contributing less than they were in taxes and using a larger portion of government funded programs.
4) Cost to society is more than a dollar value. Even IF there is a positive sum transaction displacing workers where every single worker manages to find a comparable new job there is a psychological cost. How much time has the Slashdot collective spent stressing about long term job prospects? What about white collar workers in other fields who can see the trends? What about people who have to move away from friends and family for a new job? Or work in an area which is less fulfilling to them? These costs are impossible to quantify, but are an example of intangible costs.
5) Where does this trend leave us long term. Even if every individual transaction is economically beneficial, what other impacts does it have? The collapse of the middle class is one possible impact. Rampant inflation as the US dollar fails is another. These are really other topics of discussion, I just mention them to illustrate that there are more considerations than A + B > C
Yes, the end of a lot of business models are in sight due to recent advanYes, the end of a lot of business models are in sight due to recent technological empowerments of consumers. Trying to sweep back the tide with laws and artificial limitations is an exercise in futility. So your question as to what takes the place of ad revenue is the million dollar question. Anybody with half a brain can come up with some ideas, but the clever guy who figures out a new business model that works well given the current environment is gonna make bank, and promptly be imitated by the rest of the industry. Just because the crazy idea of giving content away and making money on the side effects in a certain format has worked so well for so long doesn't mean it can or should continue to work. What took the place of ad revenue when pop up blockers became main stream? What took the place of subscription revenue when people started getting their news from the net instead of the newspaper? Cry me a river if mediocre sit-com stars can no longer get 10 million dollars an episode because the consumer has got other options now.
As far as Tivo placing adds on the screen, there is nothing morally wrong with it, the consumer is just getting less value from their service, assuming their attention is worth something.
ces in consumer technology
Sorry you had such a bum experience, but it seems like your gripes don't have much to do with the online portion of online dating. I did the online dating thing for a couple of years and ended up meeting my wife through Match.com. Sure, I had a couple of, um, interesting dates, and yeah there were several woman who brushed me off or were bitches, but that's no different than any other way you meet women. Have you ever been to a bar and seen a reasonably attractive woman sitting alone? For long?
Most women you would want to date are used to being hit on all the time. Yes, they do have a lot of choices, all they have to do is not put up a fight to get picked up. I'll let you in on a secret though. Women worth dating don't want to be picked up by 99% of the jerks out there. Obviously you don't want someone hung up on movie star looks. Great! They're weeding themselves out for you by not responding to you. Trust me there are good women out there interested in more than tight abs, you just need to find the ones that are a good match for you. There is no secret here, if you're looking for a rare woman you just have to go through a lot of them. That's a lot easier to do online, and in my experience it's a lot easier to present a good first impression when you're not shy and stammering. Oh, and don't take it personally if some bimbo blows you off. Keep in mind, most people in general aren't worth knowing, and people that act like that already have two strikes against them....
You're kidding, right? While I agree that some of these predictions are optimistic, you can't honestly claim that life is essentially the same as it was before cell phones and the internet. I guess it might be, depending on your lifestyle, but not if you're really using these technologies. I've had the internet my entire adult life, and a cell phone for most of it, and I can no more really picture life without them any more than I could life without automobiles. I can't imagine not being able to look up anything I want on wikipedia, or finding the cheapest and best goods in the world at my fingertips, or being exposed to world news not prepackaged by huge media conglomerates. I can look up how to fix my toaster, or if I need to be worried about that rash, or what the best home remedy is for an ant infestation. You have access to a significant portion of mankind's knowledge, and you claim that's not a big deal? To a lesser extent, the cell phone is also a significant change in lifestyle. Lose track of your party at the zoo? Have a breakdown on the side of the road? Need to dial 911 when you're not at home? Worried because you're kid is late coming home? None of these are as life altering as the net, but they do (can) significantly change how we live our lives.
As I said, some of these predictions are optimistic, but you only need one or two Big Things to significantly change how we live our day to day lives.
Ps.
Now I've seen everything. On Slashdot you ask what have computers done for us in the last 2 decades and get modded insightful.
Why do I do it? The same reason I skip commercials on my Tivo (and presumably you use that time to go to the bathroom or get another drink), change the radio station when another 10 minute car brand screaming fest begins, and flip past the half of the magazine telling me I need to smoke cigarettes and get plastic surgery. Just because somebody is giving something away for free (or cheap)with the hope that they can make money on it does not make me obligated to allocate my (finite and valuable) attention where they hope I will. Yes, bandwidth costs money, and if webmasters can make ends meet by taking advantage of human nature more power to them. Me spending my attention on crap I will NEVER spend a dime on DOES NOT HELP THEM. Ads support websites because some people buy what is advertised, the demographic that uses ad blocking are poeple who don't respond well to ads anyway.
The entire reason ad blocking exists is because flashing pop up/under seizure inducing immoral fucks try and force me to waste my attention on their crap. Is anybody trying to block Google ads?
Come on, are you serious? Setting aside the fucked up legal system in this country, you're actually saying the laywer has a moral right to not be called names? Don't get me wrong, trolls are only slightly better than lawyers, but Jesus Christ if you're so thin skinned that a 14 year old can make you cry I'm not sure what you're doing on the internet. Gimme a break, you can't enter a flame war than cry foul when the trolls show up. IMHO this is a big part of whats wrong with America. A "right" not to be humiliated in a public place. Gimme a break and learn how to live in the real world. Dealing with rude people is a necessity of living in the modern world, trying to sue them away seems so counterproductive as to be almost a parody.
I've heard a lot of arguments against micropayments based on this "nobody would use it" argument. Why pay for things when you can theoretically get the same thing for free somewhere else? Because there is percieved value there greater than what you are paying to access it. A pretty direct analogy in fairly widespread use already is sites that require free registration to access "premium" content. Because it takes some of your time, which presumably has a positive value, the cost of accessing this info is non-zero. Sure, some people (especially around here) get aggrivated and don't use such sites, but apparently enough people do register to keep such sites in that model.
The percieved need by the customer is the need for the access to premium content. If a site has things which you cannot *easily* get from a competing free site, it's worth $.01 to a lot of people to just click and access it. This is how I imagine micropayments will catch on, with sites having a free section to get you hooked, then having a micropayment to access the premium stuff once they've got your interest and raised the percieved value over $.01.
Bullshit.
Most people suck at being parents. Its hard to do well, and most people lack the aptitude, the drive to put in the effort, or both. That's been the case since this race was started, and it's nothing newly caused by TV. Most people make poor teachers(and students) as well for the same reason. This is nothing new, its just become fashionable to bitch about it lately. The reason there are more divorces today is because of a shift in cultural value. Divorces of today were the bad marriages of yesterday. People haven't gotten any worse at relationships, they just value the institution of marriage less.
The reason both parents usually work is because the buying power of the average paycheck has plummeted. Sure, you can live off of just one salary in theory, if you just don't buy STUFF. You don't really need broadband, heck, even dialup is not strictly necessary..use the library! Braces for your daughter are realy just cosmetic surgery, and traveling a bit to show your kids what the world has to offer is a needless waste. Hmmm, maybe that cheap apartment you're renting doesn't seem like such a good idea when you see the types of friends you son makes, but at least your wife is home to watch! What, she wants to see the world outside your door once and a while to? Well, you can't really afford tickets to anything or more than McDonalds, but she's welcome to see anything within walking distance! I sure hope your kids can get scholarships, 'cause you sure can't afford to help them out....
Stop and think about what it really takes to raise a family of four on $30-40k/year today (most people make less than us L337 IT jockeys). Can it be done? Of course, but you give up a hell of a lot of good opportunities not just for you, but for your children.
Granted, I am fairly vehemently anti-corporate/advertising, but having spent the last 10 months on one income as my wife is on maternity leave, I can tell you you lose a lot more than crap you didn't really want in the first place. You miss good opportunities with the bad, which is why my wife is going back to work shortly.
Right, Blockbuster is getting screwed, but there isn't much that they can do about it because they're just the middleman. There is a benefit to most consumer (see my original post), and thus a demand. The thing is, you don't really need Blockbuster to carry the DVDs now. Since there are no returns to worry about, you could have vending machines dispense them, or order them off the net, or have a movie club where you get x number of new releases mailed to you every month, you can stock them at Wal-Mart, you can sell them door to door, etc.
Now, if customers are demanding it, and the supplier doesn't need Blockbuster anymore, Blockbuster's choices are to straight up lose a large part of their market, or take the little bit of profit it can get by selling these things.
Frankly, I don't really understand why everybody here is frothing at the mouth about this. Seems like a good deal to me. You can, of course, still buy a full movie if you want to own it, but if you just want to rent one for one viewing this is a hell of a lot more convenient.
On the downside, the initial learning curve is a bit steep. Check out the demo but believe me, even the veteran gamer will want to take a run through the fan created tutorial
Take a step back and pretend that you're not part of the Slashdot crowd, you're part of the VAST MAJORITY of people who are not inclined to hacking stuff. The grandmothers, the wives, the truck drivers, you know, all those poeple who have unsecured/unpatched computers sitting on broadband connections PLUS all the people who don't even use a computer/the net regularly. Now, looking at it through their eyes, what do you see? You head down to blockbuster to pick up the latest hollywood hype, and you're presented with two options. Lets assume they are the same price.
1) Regular DVD. Fair chance it's scratched up a the previous renter, and when you forget to return it (which you often do) it's gonna end up costing you twice as much. You can watch it as many times as you want (in two days), and even lend it to a friend (try not to get it back late!)
2) Disposable DVD. It's a fresh copy virtually garaunteed to not be scratched. You can only watch the movie once, but that's all you planned on doing anyway. Toss it when you're done, gauranteed no late fees.
Now, think about how you'd explain to your mom why she doesn't want #2, and tell me again how there is no market.
As far as who is going to sell it, the middleman doesn't really have much of a say in that. If the big money supplier is pushing it, and the customers are demanding it, the free market will force the middleman to sell it or lose out to his competition that is.
This is just silly logic. Most coders of ANY age aren't good hackers. Just because the toys you learned to hack on had less bits than the ones I did doesn't make you a king with a deeper innate understanding of technology. Giving a kid a degree doesn't make them a hacker, but learning in a different environment than you did doesn't mean the younger hackers didn't learn the same lessons. Make no mistake about it, the younger you is out there, and he was taking apart his own toys at 10, they were just different than the ones you grew up with. You can turn out better code today because of your experience, but it's pretty assinine to think anyone who had different toys than you will never catch up.
Yeah, up until about a month ago I worked at the same company. This last pay-raise-that's-really-a-pay-cut was the straw that broke the camel's back. The whole blatant lack of regard for their employees just got to be too much. After I leave I hear about them shifting huge amounts of jobs overseas, so I guess it was a good time to get out. In the 2.5 years I was there:
1) I was told that in spite of being a top performer I was getting a crappy review because seniority dictated that the small number of good reviews go to the dead weight that had been there longer than I'd been alive.
2) In spite of virtually single handledly saving a multi-million dollar contract with months worth of hard work, I was chastised for not working enough overtime while accomplishing it.
3) How is it possible to have more management than producers, yet still not have an ounce of leadership among them? I think Dilbert read strips about us...
Well, Best Buy guys don't work on commission, but back in the day I worked at Circuit City, and we did work on commission there. The pressure to sell the extended warranty was ridiculous. Most of the time the commission would be on the order of $1-$10 for selling a $1200 computer system, then an extra $35 or so for selling a $250 extended warranty. On top of the fact that you couldn't make a living working straight commission without selling it on most of your sales, if your percentage of sales with it wasn't high enough you wouldn't be working there long.
That money is nearly straight profit, you do the math on whether it's a good deal for the customer to buy it....
The problem is that each of these has a drawback, and as you're stacking solutions you're also stacking drawbacks. So now we need to worry about false positives, collateral damage, and legal system abuses. Since more or less all of these partial solutions are out there now, I guess you are thinking we just need to standardize such tactics. Problem is, the internet is inherently heterogeneous. Having a hundred different implementations of a dozen different types of solutions all running at once will make email unreliable enought to kill it as a legitamate communications medium. We're already heading down that path now.
The basis of your argument is that there is fundamentally no difference between spam and other forms of unsolicited communication. Well, obviously there is, because spam is an increasingly significant problem whereas conversing with people at the pub is not. Technology makes spam a different problem because of the scale. Many things that are permisable or even desirable at one scale become undesirable at another.
Your argument is analogous to saying "we can't make fully automatic assault rifles illegal without making pistols illegal to, they're the same thing. Pellet guns to."
No, they're not.
Where I work, it's a corporate mandate that we work at least 10% overtime all the time. Doesn't sound that bad next to people working 60-80 hours a week, but the thing is the way they calculate it. Employees must work a certain number of hours in a year, which means that extra week or two of vacation you get for seniority (not to mention sick time, non-billable training, etc.)is just extra overtime that you have to work to make up.
I guess it's understandable since they bill the customer for me by the hour, who doesn't like free money? The thing that kills me though is that it's independent of workload/schedules, so if we're in between emergency deadlines and I finish my stuff early I better damn well surf the net in the office for the rest of my overtime hours....
Cafes and coffee shops are (partially) replaced by McDonalds and Starbucks because thats what the people who spend money want. Blue Jeans and baseball hats are spreading because thats what people who spend money want. People DO vote for such things quite literally with thier pounds, yet, etc.
Yes, obviously freed slaves were a huge economic buying segment. There was much more money to be made selling things to appallingly poor people than to having free labor.
You're damn right we put individual freedom above virtually every other principal, and you'd do well to remember that when you start complaining about your lack of freedom from American culture.
At my school most of the later classes focussed on team developed projects. OS and compiler classes were pretty straightforward big group efforts, but the real interesting one was my Software Engineering class. The project, which spanned the entire semester, involved three interworking modules, with each person in the class working on an individual implementation of one of the three. After an initial design and preliminary developement period everyone reviewed a certain number of other people's work, and "bought" the two other modules they needed ("bought" modules gained significant grade points). As the project progressed and support for different things for different "customers" was called for, modules could be returned and new ones "bought" with "economic" (read grade) penalties for both dropped vendor and customer, though the newly "bought" module gained points. At the end of the semester the overall projects were graded on a speed test given a specific large input set (i.e. the fastest one got the highest grade).
Generally, once you had proved you have basic coding skills (as in you're in upper level CS classes), the teachers would encourage working together, pretty much most stuff short of cutting and pasting code was cool most of the time. There was an official "intellectual honesty" policy, but really it was just there for the teachers to use in the case of blatantly lazy students. Pretty much it was just an extension fo the study group idea...
1) Drug companies obviously make too much money if they spend it on advertising and lobbying. All the good, hardworking companies cut such things out to be more competitive.
2) If we take away the profit in developing new drugs, we will net more lives saved. We don't need the billions spent by evil investors primarily motivated by money. New drugs will be developed fast enough through good will that lives will not be lost which could have been saved by faster/better research. This certainly won't compound over the next hundred+ years as disease and sickness evolve, I mean heck, everyone knows evolution is a screwy theory. We probably won't even need any new research.
3) Nationalization of private assets for the good of the whole is a great idea. I mean, if you can't trust your government, who can you trust?
Back in my early college days I was working as a on-site residential PC troubleshooter. I have all kinds of interesting stories, but my favorite is this one lady who just kept hovering over me and generally aggravating me to distraction. After an hour or so of her staring over my shoulder and asking questions every time I clicked on anything I finally figured out what the problem was and fixed it(don't remember what it was, doesn't matter to the story). At this point my stress level had been climbing steadily for an hour and I was just ready to leave. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that proclaiming to have found the problem will necessitate a lengthy explanation of what was wrong and how I fixed it, which would in turn necessitate a lengthy background build up on the workings of Windows. So after a minute of thought, I stood up and said I figured out what the problem was. I picked up the potted plant she had on one side of her monitor, and moved it to the other. At this point she is pretty sure I'm bullshitting her, but I tell her to try the computer now. Sure enough, it works great. She's still not buying it, so I come up with some story about the minerals in the plant and electromagnetic radiation, and I throw in some terms I had heard on Star Trek the night before. As I'm walking out the door I remind her to rotate the plant once a month to prevent further buildups.